Limitations of Preview Mode

The preview options available for a Web experience can help you confirm that an action works the way you intended.

Recent updates to Safari Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) block third-party cookies on your website. This update means that Preview Mode and the Monetate Inspector browser tool may not work in Safari. Monetate has developed an alternative approach to delivering preview mode to the site. To have this option enabled for your account, submit a request using the Monetate Technical Support portal (support.monetate.com).

There is no known workaround at this time for the Inspector tool. Instead, use a different browser such as Chrome if you need to use the Inspector tool.

The preview function, however, does have some limitations because it doesn't recognize or store session data that some actions and action conditions require. Furthermore, the preview of a Web experience ignores the WHO settings.

Therefore, to test an experience's WHO targets or to test an experience that uses any of the actions or action conditions that don't work in Preview Mode, you must configure the experience with your IP address as the WHO target and then activate it. By activating the experience with only your IP address as the target, you can see what the experience would look like for intended targets without it actually being visible to anyone else.

If you need assistance determining your IP address, you can visit whatismyip.com or use other online IP lookup tools to identify your IP address. The address must be in the IPv4 format (x.x.x.x) and cannot include wildcards.

Follow the steps in the Using an IP Address WHO Target section of Activate an Experience for Preview and Testing to perform this type of experience testing.

Actions That Don't Work in Preview Mode

The actions that don't work when previewing an experience are primarily recommendations actions using recommendation strategies configured with certain types of recommendation algorithms.

Product Recommendations Actions

You cannot preview a recommendation action that uses a recommendation strategy configured with any of these recommendation algorithms:

  • Recently Viewed
  • Purchased and Also Purchased
  • Viewed and Also Viewed
  • Viewed and Later Purchased
  • Items Frequently Bought Together (premium option)
  • Subsequently Purchased (premium option)

Except for the Recently Viewed recommendation algorithm, all the others are collaborative algorithms and thus require session date to work. Because Preview Mode doesn't recognize or store this data, these algorithms don't work when you attempt to preview the experience. See Recommendation Algorithms for more information.

Legacy Recommendations Actions

If your account uses the legacy Recommendations feature, you cannot preview an endcap action configured with a merchandiser set that uses one of these set types:

  • Top selling by purchase count
  • Top selling by gross revenue
  • Purchased and also purchased
  • Viewed and also viewed
  • Viewed and later purchased

See Endcap Guide for more information.

Action Conditions That Don't Work in Preview Mode

Any action condition you build using one of these options doesn't work in Preview Mode:

  • Cart value
  • Landing page

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